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The first time I went to Bristol, I was seven. The last time (at least to date), I was 56. NASCAR changed just as much.

On the day that Ned Jarrett won the 1965 Volunteer 500, the grandstands reminded me of a large high school football stadium. Little asphalt-paved paths led up inclines on each side. People huffed and puffed as they hoisted their ice chests and picnic baskets and trudged up the bank. Nothing was on rollers back then. The turns were lightly banked. Five hundred laps were more than enough to excite me.

The next time I went to Bristol, it was to write about it. It was the day after Alan Kulwicki’s death on a nearby hillside. I watched most of Busch (now Xfinity) qualifying from behind the gate in the second turn. From that vantage, it reminded me of a pinball machine. A year or two later, Bud Moore used that term when I informed him that NASCAR was about to increase the size of short-track starting fields from 36 to 43.

Bud wasn’t fond of Bristol. Too many of his hand-tooled Fords had a habit of getting torn up there.

“It ought to be against the law to put more than two dozen cars on that #*&^%+= pinball machine!” he yelled into my ear over the din of practice.

I’ve never had to fix torn-up race cars, and the world is a better place because of it. I kind of liked Bristol.

Once, when scribes were scribes and editors were nervous, newspapers had deadlines, and, in order to get word of a momentous event such as the Bristol night race out, writers would be allowed to go as late as it took for a race to end and not a second more.

Now those same editors, measurably more relaxed, say, “Ah, we’ll get it on the website.”

The Bristol Motor Speedway press box, in those days, lacked only the world’s fate in order to be the War Room.

Caution flags. Red flags. Everything but a checkered one. I had a watch fail once solely from the energy of me staring at it.

Write it as it goes, baby.

“Wallace regained the lead on lap 432, passing Burton in traffic. With Burton’s Ford stuck on the outside behind the lapped Pontiac of Michael Waltrip, Earnhardt slipped into second on the next circuit …”

Build a lead around an apparent victory by Wallace. Put three or four paragraphs in the bank. Start taking out first names that were used earlier in the story. Edit the grammar. Turn it into a passable story.

Wallace doesn’t win. This is when all the fans who think all the writers do nothing but sit behind laptops and stuff their faces with hot dogs should be there. Imagine the Tasmanian Devil, sitting behind a laptop and stuffing his face with hot dogs.

This race, of course, is in the daytime, but the reverse isn’t true anymore. Once I loved daytime races because I had the time to craft a good, coherent story (several, actually) afterwards. That damned Internet puts anything at any time on a deadline, the deadline being “get it as quickly as you can.”

It’s nothing like the days when missing a deadline meant missing a day’s paper, but, like modern life in general, it’s aggravating.